Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (19 page)

The answer, for the moment, was “constantly”: especially in my apartment, because Dennis Savage’s ailing mother had suffered one of those turns so pointed that the family had been summoned. So
now Peter was taking his after-work Gay Initiation Class with me. Of course, like every fresh adherent to a cause, he was trying to lecture me even as he learned. Oh, he was respectful—but so eager!

One evening, we were in the middle of an intellectually ferocious debate on the value of an extra-big physique.

“Carlo says you’ve got to overwhelm them,” Peter told me. “Make them hungry. That’s his—”

“But some of them like a slim-jim look,” I told him. “They find heavy muscles tendentious.”

He slowly, confidently shook his head and bunched up his right biceps.

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“Feel it.”

Kids, he was big, and I caught him savoring my look of surprise.

“That’s my shock value,” he said.

“Where did all this happen so fast?”

“Every weekday morning. From eight to nine-thirty. At Better Bodies.”

“Jeepers.”

“Monday morning, upper torso. Tuesday morning, legs and abs. Wednesday—”

“Stop.”

“And, I have to add, I jump out of bed each day almost
on fire
with the devotion. Well? Do you see how serious I . . .”

Cosgrove had come in, bearing an eight-by-ten envelope, and ensconced himself beside me, waiting restlessly for the talk to cease. When Peter, curious, dried up, Cosgrove whispered to me, quite loudly, “Make him go, there’s a secret to tell.”

“No, that’s fine,” said Peter, rising. “I have a pile of manuscripts to sift through tonight.”

“That’s exciting,” I replied, taking him to the door while Cosgrove banged his hand against the couch armrest to urge a speedier tempo of farewell upon us. “Think of discovering the next Dostoyefsky.”

He gave me an amused look, said, “Somehow that never happens,” and left, and I immediately reproached Cosgrove for his brusqueness.

“Yes, but why is he always around?” Cosgrove shot back. “And always
looking
at everyone?”

“Looking?”

“Like he’s scoping out our . . .” Wrestling open the envelope, he pulled out more Photo Snoops shots and handed them to me with a look of silent triumph. These were better than the average, well-lit and focused, daylight shots taken down along the West Village piers among the weekend cruising population: bladers and bikers and dog walkers and, in particular, one order of louche to go, a big, bosomy skater in dark glasses and running shorts whom the Snoops had caught leering and winking and staring at all the cute boys, and talking to them in what appeared to be tones as low as the Duncan Hines rating of a hot-sheets motel, and touching them like Ziegfeld auditioning candidates for the
Follies
.

And his name was Pleasure: but also Peter Keene.

“Now, do you see?” said Cosgrove. “He has a
secret life!”

“Wait a minute. You just
happened
upon him like this?”

Cosgrove made a “Boy, are you dumb” face. “We waited outside his apartment last Saturday and followed him downtown.”

“You have nothing better to do than wait out—”

“We’re the Photo Snoops, we
have
to wait. We were outside the Hard Rock Café for four hours last week. Remember our motto: ‘No star too small, no fee too large.’ ”

“But why Peter Keene?”

“We’re keeping a file on everybody, because
you never know.”

“Does that include Dennis Savage and Carlo and me as well?”

“ ‘Be afraid,’ ” he advised me, quoting some movie again. “ ‘Be very afraid.’ ”

Reviewing the pictures, I had to admire Peter’s commitment to the belief that stylish cruising technique is based above all upon a physical makeover. Clearly, he had good genetics, as they say; but clearly he was also Really Going at It. I’ve seen this before. Guys
who took a fast metabolism for granted reach twenty-eight or so, notice that the competition from buffed twenty-four-year-olds is all but running them out of town, and decide to get into shape. The gym turns out to be an inspiring locale, loaded with imitable madeovers, and as the exercise program expands the mirror becomes dazzling. For the first time in their lives, they’re starting to look like someone they themselves might want.

“So what if Peter is cruising on weekends?” I asked Cosgrove. “He has a right.”

“Virgil told me Dennis Savage says Peter is out of control. And you know if one apple in the barrel goes rotten, they
all
start crabbing. What if Peter becomes crazed and brings tension into the family?”

“What family?”

“This.”

It was the first time that Cosgrove had acknowledged that our convivial enclave might be something integral rather than just a bunch of people he knows, and I was thinking, Well, bless his little heart. Then he pulled out another series of pictures.

“Ah, more Photo Snoops,” I said, taking in the shots of Peter not only cruising but eagerly coming on: For in these shots he was rifling the shorts of a young man—a shirtless skater, like Peter—then grabbing his head for depth-charge kisses, and at last rolling away with his conquest like movie pals into a sunset.

I said, “Maybe the Photo Snoops should give up celebrity hunting and just shoot porn.”

“We may have to,” said Cosgrove, collecting his pictures. “Last night we spent the whole evening in the theatre district like those horrible autograph hounds, and all we could find was Dirty Desmond Dilsey.”

I was, like,
Who?

“Some porn star,” Cosgrove explained. “He
said
he was, anyway. He was going into Folly City. Are you going to talk to Peter? That he shouldn’t do this?”

“It’s a free country, Cos.”

“But he doesn’t know what there could be. Like when they say, Oh, you are such a cutie, I want you to move in and take care of you. So you give them everything, and next morning you say, So what about breakfast? And they go, Get out of my house, sucker!”

There was a pause, and then the phone rang, and it was Dennis Savage from upstate. Cosgrove scooted along and I took the call.

His mother had “gone out like a candle,” he said: waning, darkening, throwing off a last momentary shudder, then still.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“It’s better that she is not now, and can never be again, in pain.”

“When do they read the will?”

“I knew I could count on your sprightly humor to ease me through the ordeal.”

“I hate parents and I’m glad she’s dead.”

“Yes, keep those droll mots coming.”

“Listen,” I said, “is there a porn star named Dirty . . . Dickie Something?”

“Come again?”

“The Photo Snoops clocked him at Folly City. Dirty . . .”

“How are they holding up?”

“Fine. Though Virgil’s a little crusty with Cosgrove.”

“With me, too. He’s going through another of his phases. How are you and Peter getting on?”

“Okay.”

“I hear a tone.”

“Yeah. It’s that supergay role he plays. He’s like something out of a late-seventies novel. You know: So many men, and it’s going to take me maybe till next Tuesday.”

“Oh!
Daniel Daring!”

“Who what?”

“The porn star you were asking about. He did a solo video called
Dirty Daniel Daring
and he dances at Folly City.”

“You
are
up on your celebs, aren’t you?”

“Remember to go easy on Peter. He has a lot to catch up on. He needs encouragement, and you can give it.”

“I will if you give me points in your portion of your mother’s will.”

“Be good, and I’ll be back soon,” he said.

I have to admit, the idea of Peter coming into his own legacy as an heir of Stonewall rather intrigued me. I wanted him to recall to me the age in which those who absolutely cultivated themselves as icons of hot could blow open all the locks and screw the world.

There’s this, too: On summer weekends, the Park’s too crowded, so one has to bike elsewhere. I favor downtown, because of the Strand Bookstore, Footlight Records, and my favorite Polish luncheonette, Teresa’s, on Second Avenue.
But this day I rode down to the West Village piers, to see what I could see, such as Peter. Nothing much was doing—a few bladers and runners, some posing and taunting. But there was none of the atmosphere of Major Men Seriously Available that once permeated this part of town in the seventies.

This place was a meat rack then; there are no meat racks anymore, because the monolithic sexuality that early Stonewall built so big has dwindled, as Congreve says, into a wife. Sex, today, is a pastime in gay life, like the canasta parties that suburbanites threw in the 1950s: a treat you save for special nights, so it doesn’t get in the way of the basic things, like gardening or Burns and Allen.

Or dog owning. For here came a fine and full, tight and trim young lad. Twenty years ago, he would have been lurking in the
area looking studly; today, he was walking a beagle, uninterested in anything else. He wasn’t on the make, except for the dog, whom he constantly fondled and purred to. She was Josephine, it turned out, and he was a dreamboat. I guessed his name was Tim.

I’m on my bike, now, immobile, watching.

There’s another dog owner around, the kind who owns not a pet but an entire kennel and who believes that New York City’s leash law is for other people. One of his dogs decides to investigate Josephine. So he goes trotting up to sniff Josephine’s behind in that louche canine etiquette they have. But Josephine doesn’t want to be sniffed. She appears quite frightened of this stranger dog’s attention, and plants her bum flat against the pavement.

Tim doesn’t like this invasion of his pet’s personal space. He shouts “Hey!” and tries to chase the intruding dog away. It retreats, briefly, then renews its advances, while Tim uses the hand end of Josephine’s leash as a whip in the air to keep it at bay as he angrily calls out, “Who owns this dog?
Call off your dog!”

The owner has been talking to a Hispanic man, who points out the problem even as the owner has turned at the noise.

Now hear this: Does the owner leap over the concrete divider that he’s standing behind and pull his dog away, apologizing to Tim for the harassment?

No. The owner stands there whistling very very lightly at his animal, who of course pays no attention.

Tim is not willing to let his dog be terrorized, so he gives the intruding dog a kick in the ass.

I look at the owner at this point; he’s still whistling. The Hispanic man is saying something to him with a look of baleful contentment at the prospect of bloodletting soon.

The marauding dog is not going to be easily discouraged, for despite the kick he comes right around sniffing at the miserable Josephine. This time, Tim kicks the dog in the muzzle, real socko, and the animal yelps but keeps on coming, so Tim kicks it three times in the head as hard as he can.

Finally, the owner of the dog—the thing’s still attacking
Josephine, by the way, and still getting kicked—has decided to intervene, but only to assault Tim, jumping the divider and running full-tilt at him.

Next, three things occur at almost exactly the same time: One, Tim intercepts the attack by grabbing his assailant by the hair to use the force of his own charge to slam him head-first into the cement barrier at the water’s edge. Two, I note the Hispanic man beaming with delight. Three, the police arrive.

They’re all over us
real
quick, separating the combatants and ignoring the dogs. Do you believe that the intruder is
still
trying to whiff Josephine’s rump? I presume she was in heat. The cops start piecing it together from onlookers, and one of the cops, taking note of Josephine’s barks of distress, grabs the other dog by the collar, slings it over the divider, and tells it, “Stay there or you’re dead” in a tone so telling that, finally, the dog desists.

Tim is in handcuffs, an ambulance arrives, and now the Hispanic guy strolls up with “I saw the whole thin’, Officer, and this guy [pointing to Tim] started it. He’s some piece of trash, Officer. Dissin’ everybody, threatenin’ me and others I could name like he’s some kind of this honcho.” The Hispanic guy looks around at all of us, his arms out, nodding at us to encourage him, to chime in with affirmations. “Yeah, they all saw. And this guy—”